LoTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 Community Day Writeup

By One Dead Angel, Socvazius and Adder

As you may know One Dead Angel (AKA Ray), Socvazius (AKA Sergio) and myself (Adder, AKA Alex) were invited to Los Angeles for the Electronic Arts Los Angeles (EALA) Battle for Middle Earth 2 (BFME2) Community Summit. We had the chance to preview the game, give our feedback as community leaders, modders and gamers, meet others from the community, and have a load of fun on EA’s (and NVIDIA’s, who graciously sponsored the event) bill. This is my writeup of the event. For more detailed information on the game you should check out Socvazius’ preview, and One Dead Angel’s overview of the game’s modding and creative aspects.

Day 1

I arrived at the Seattle airport at about 12:30 as my flight was set to leave at 1:39. The security check-in went smoothly and quickly and I was at my gate around 12:45. Unfortunately my plane was slightly delayed and we didn’t take off until 2:00, so I burned some time reading and surfing the internet for information about Battle for Middle Earth, as I’d never played the game.

After arriving in Los Angeles around 4:30 I took a cab to the Ritz Carlton at Marina del Ray, where we were staying. I had a crazy cabbie who apparently didn’t realize that turn signals were built into cars for a reason… you can use your imagination for the 20 minute drive. I checked in and went up to my room where I met Jonathon from GameReplays.org who had broken into my room. We talked for a bit until Jonathon called Chris, a buddy from GameReplays. Chris came up to join us, and they discussed the intricacies of Command & Conquer balance while I relaxed and occasionally threw in comments. Some complementary cookies arrived to my profound joy, and I, as I’m sure anybody placed under similar circumstances would do, ate some.

At around 6:25 we headed down to the lobby of the Ritz where Aaron, the community manager for EALA, and the guy who arranged everything (an absolutely amazing guy) had told us to met him. Here I met Sergio, Ray and a bunch of other guys. Aaron was a bit late, arriving at around 5 minutes to 7:00, so we talked for a while and pretended we were not out of place standing with pretty generic clothes in one of the most prestigious and expensive hotels in the world. When Aaron arrived he told us to go sit down in the back to wait for the pizza. We sat, talk, and ate. Aaron handed out cool access cards for the studio and explained our schedule. Eventually we went around the table and introduced ourselves. Judging from the introductions it seemed the majority of those invited had roots in the Command & Conquer (or just EA RTS games, for simplification purposes) community. Ray and I both felt a little out of the loop as we were the only ones who hadn’t played BFME, and belonged to communities that were unrepresented at the summit. I assume our varied perspectives warranted our invitation.

After the meet and greet was over we (Sergio, Ray and I) went with Matt, a modder who’d been working on a Rise of Rome modification for BFME, and two other guys from BFME Vault to check out his mod. It looked really good, seemed to play quite well, apparently the AI was much improved from the original game, and as the game was a total conversion quite a few things had been changed. We hung out for a while and talked about the mod before retiring around 11:00.

Next: On to day 2